Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [42]
O’Neill wasted no time either, diving to the ground beside the ditch as she drew her own phase pistol and turned toward the intruder who had appeared so unexpectedly behind her, probably from one of the other small ships parked nearby. She fired as a weapon held by one of the attackers made a series of loud, staccato reports. An old-style metal projectile weapon, O’Neill decided as she returned fire through the smoke cloud that was swiftly rising around the site of the ambush.
The noise ceased abruptly and the smoke began slowly clearing. O’Neill could see now that there were four attackers—at least so far—each of whom had apparently hidden themselves earlier in or behind at least two other nearby spacecraft, or perhaps on the roof of the closest of the spaceport’s outbuildings.
They could have been watching us ever since we landed here, she thought as she moved toward the bodies, kneeling beside the nearest supine form. Either that, or our oh-so-cooperative Mister Grakka set up this ambush right after we left. She paused to look quickly around the tarmac again, and noticed that the slug was currently nowhere in sight; she wondered if that fact attested to his guilt, or demonstrated his instinct for self-preservation. Too bad I don’t have time to find out.
O’Neill removed the hood of the alien’s cloak—he was male, and apparently barely out of adolescence—and checked his neck for a pulse. She noted with some relief that he seemed to be merely unconscious. The stun setting on a phase pistol, after all, was calibrated to human physiology; there was no way to guarantee its nonlethality to every unknown species.
O’Neill picked up the boy’s long-barreled pistol—a small though surprisingly heavy hand cannon, really—then looked over at Peruzzi, who was busy disarming the other three bodies while checking them for signs of life. The MACO’s single affirmative nod indicated that the rest of the hostiles had also been rendered safely insensate rather than killed outright.
These aren’t warriors, O’Neill thought, feeling a surge of sympathy for these people despite the harrowing, if brief, firefight they had just provoked. Whether they’re working for Grakka or not, they’re probably just desperate, poverty-stricken young people willing to risk everything to steal a ship so they can get off this hellhole. They must have known the shuttlepod wouldn’t have been spaceworthy if they’d just blasted their way inside.
As Corporal Peruzzi moved cautiously into the roadway in search of any other assailants that might be about, O’Neill reminded herself that these four weren’t the only desperate people on the planet.
“Ensign Chandra,” she said as she began ejecting several unspent metal shells from the unconscious alien’s weapon. “Scan the area to see if there are any more hostiles hiding nearby. I don’t want any more surprises before we get safely under way.”
Hearing no response from Chandra, O’Neill dropped the now-empty weapon in the dust and turned back toward the shuttlepod.
Then she saw why Chandra hadn’t replied. His limp body lay askew across the threshold of the shuttlepod’s open port hatchway, and a blackened, bloody hole gaped in the young man’s chest. His unseeing eyes were frozen in a mask of surprise, and his hand clutched a phase pistol. He had evidently opted to defend the shuttlepod rather than taking the more expedient route of using the shuttlepod’s hatch for cover. O’Neill saw immediately that he was already far beyond the help of the vessel’s emergency medical kits. Even Doctor Phlox, with all the resources of Enterprise’s state-of-the-art sickbay at his disposal, probably couldn’t have saved him.
Dammit! “Corporal, we’re getting out of here. Now!”
O’Neill felt simultaneously pained and numb, as though she had just received a crippling body blow. As she and Peruzzi carried Chandra’s corpse all the way into the shuttlepod, O’Neill was seized by a nearly irresistible urge to shout imprecations at the corporal. She somehow managed to restrain